Conclusion

Summary

‘The forests were on fire – / they however/ wreathed their necks with their hands/ like bouquets of roses / … / like two drops / stuck at the edge of a face.’ These lines are by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, and are quoted by the Polish teacher Smutek. They refer to the two drops of water that are his pupils, Ada and Alev. They are also a presentiment of the two drops that he himself would form with Ada. ‘So doth each teare, / Which thee doth weare, / A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,’ wrote the seventeenth-century poet John Donne.

For Donne, a ball becomes a globe, a tear a world, and the mixing of lovers’ tears a deluge. This is what Eliot called ‘poetry as thinking,’ feeling a thought ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’. It is what Erasmus called Christianity and Huizinga called symbolism. Not everyone is receptive to it, but it is the lifeblood of literature.

According to philosophy, it is the misuse of language. As John Locke once wrote, ‘the two ideas of a man and a centaur, supposed to be the ideas of real substances, are the one true and the other false; the one having a conformity to what has really existed, the other not.’ Yet it was precisely this that Huizinga so envied in the child, the savage and the poet: that they became a kangaroo in the magic dance. ‘A person who is not skilled in the force of language,’ wrote Erasmus, ‘is, of necessity, short-sighted, deluded, and unbalanced in his judgement of things as well.’

Words do not reflect things, they create things; language is not a representation of the world, it creates worlds. It is not something we can use free of obligation. As Aristoteles complained, the figurative use of language can make a crime of a mistake and a mistake into a crime. What one might call ‘literary ambiguity,’ another might call ‘doublethink.’ ‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies,’ is how George Orwell described doublethink in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…’